


Just Like What You See In The Movies!

by ChloShow



Category: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
Genre: College, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 18:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4489302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChloShow/pseuds/ChloShow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victor Pulak's college life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Although the rest of the counselors agreed to meet exactly 10 years later on the final day of camp, there were some friendships that would prove to transcend Camp Firewood.

\--

Victor Pulak was a college freshman. He didn’t quite meet his goal to get laid by the end of high school, but he’d do it in college for sure. From what he’d heard, girls in college were insatiable, and he was totally going to take advantage of that Fact.

He’d also heard that there were parties every day of the week, no dress codes, and an unspoken rule that things you did in college didn’t count once “real life” started.  
  
And it turned out everything he heard was true!

His friends got laid every weekend, and he…admittedly would’ve gotten laid every single night had it not been that he was sloppy drunk before he could hit on anyone who’d take him seriously. All of that aside, college was amazing; it was like you didn’t even have to go to class!

Wait, okay, not everything was amazing. He’d jumped the gun on that statement.  His roommate sucked major asshole.  Like metaphorically.  He wouldn’t know if he _actually_ sucked assholes. But metaphorically, if you could imagine the largest asshole in the world, his roommate would suck it.  
  
Everything about him was pinnacle annoying.  Even his name, Champ Predzwicki, made him shudder. There was how he’d complete all his homework immediately after class had let out and then mock Victor when he’d struggle to finish assignments 10 minutes before the deadline. Oh, and how the dude had absolutely no friends and kept his side of the room absolutely immaculate. God, he was such a loser.

Dorm life itself wasn’t so bad though. It felt a little like being back at camp with the parties and the camaraderie but without risking the lives of children in the process of having fun.  There’d only been one (minor) fire in his room so far, and that’s only because he knocked over his lava lamp after leaning too far back in his desk chair.   
  
With the _obvious_ similarities to camp, he couldn’t help but feel the absence of his old friends and lay awake at night with his regrets like giving himself (and Neil) a yeast infection by putting aftershave on his junk.  And then he’d drift to thoughts of what his life would be like if Neil was his roommate here instead of fucking Champ.

\--

He was avoiding an assignment for English (where he had to describe an experience that made him reexamine his identity and how that made him feel, pffffft), so he rifled through his desk to find an unopened boxed of condoms.  He opened it to convince himself he’d soon have an occasion to use one when he saw that they had already expired.

‘ _What an unfortunate occurrence that must be remedied immediately_ ,’ he thought, throwing the now useless condoms to his trashcan and missing entirely.  ‘ _This assignment will have to wait!_ ’ he continued, picking up the condom box and spilling them all out onto the floor before kicking them under his desk out of sight.

Fortunately he had just enough gas to make it to a gas station, so he went into pay the clerk and pick up some condoms when, as chance would have it, he ran into Neil!  The guy looked nearly the same as he had a few years earlier in ’81, and he hadn’t grown any by the looks of it either.

“Victor Pulak, you son of a bitch,” Neil smiled and went in for a hug, “What are you doing here?”

“I go to school down the road.  What the fuck are _you_ doing here, buddy?”  Victor shoved his hands in his pockets, putting the gas and condoms on hold for the moment.

 “Oh, Sherry goes here!  You remember my high school girlfriend, Sherry?  We’re sorta in a long distance thing; I’m two hours away so we only see each other on weekends.  Shit, I’m surprised I haven’t run into you earlier!”

“Dude, me either, and on a condom run of all things!” He needed to drop that in there, make sure Neil would bite and he could brag about all the chicks he’d definitely boned.

“Oh man, don’t tell me, you finally did the dirty, man?”

Victor paused and looked around the gas station to see the clerk eavesdropping, which caused a large outpouring of lies to protect himself in the public eye.

“Ahhh, yeah, it’s old hat by now, or you know, old jimmy hat. Haha, uhhh.”

Neil laughed genuinely at the bad joke, “That’s great, man, I’m so happy for ya.  But I’m seeing Sherry tonight, and I need to hurry.  She said it was urgent, and you know that could mean a million things.”

Victor scoffed, “Yeah, chicks are on a whole other planet.  Like us men, we’re on Earth, and women are on the Sun!”

“Haha, yeah, but I don’t think they’d be on the Sun though.  That’s not a planet.”

“Uh, then we’re on Earth, and they’re on…is the moon a planet?”  Victor takes time to think of another planet, snapping his fingers to jog his memory.

Neil winced, “Not even close.  How about this?  Men are from Earth; women are from—“

“Tatooine?”

“Nah, man.”

“I swear that’s a planet though.  Well, anyway, I’m in Finnley Hall, Room 217 if you find time to drop by after the Sherry business, okay?” 

Neil grinned and clasped Victor on the back, “You bet. I’m sure I can find some time tomorrow! She knows how good of friends we were at Camp Firewood; I told her all about you!”

Victor replied enthusiastically, “Yeah, and maybe then I’ll be able to tell you all about my good lays,” he humped the air, humming sexually, “Yeah, exactly like that.”

“I hope not exactly, but I’ll see you later!” With that, Neil exited and Victor turned to approach the clerk.  He pulled what change he had out of his pocked, “Uh, I’d like, um, that box of condoms there.”

The clerk pulled off a box of UltraPleasure condoms and set them on the counter, “That will be $5.00.”

The change in his hand added up to $4.23.

“Uhhh, if you could just—uh, what are your…lowest…amount of money condoms?”

The clerk put the UltraPleasure pack back on the shelf and tossed down a three pack of generic condoms, “That’ll be $1.50.”

“Okay, and could you put…” he took the time to do the math in his head, and when he couldn’t, he piled his money on the counter and sorted out a dollar fifty, “Okay, that means I have…1, 2…$2.73 left over. Could you put the $2.73 on pump 3?”

The clerk pushed the buttons on his register as slow as possible as the line piled up behind Victor, “That’ll be $4.23.”

Victor pushed his money toward the register, and the clerk lost his place counting the coins three times (to be fair, he did have 63 cents in pennies).  When the clerk finally placed all the money in his drawer, Victor grabbed the condoms and filled up the tank a couple notches above Empty.


	2. Chapter 2

Two hours after he ran into Neil, Victor was schooling some chump at pool in the res hall lobby when he heard footsteps behind him and a loudly whispered, “Victor!” calling him to the hallway.

“Not now I’m in the middle of a game,” he replied without checking to see who it might’ve been.  The next shot was a doozy, but he was sure he could make it. With a strike from his pool cue, Victor ended up knocking in the 8 ball about six balls too early. “Whoops, I think I heard a friend calling me.  Sorry I had to throw the game and everything.  You better watch your back next time for sure!”  He turned and nonchalantly strolled toward a red-faced Neil half-hiding behind a plaster pillar. “I totally just lost so that I could talk to you; only reason why I did that.  Totally on purpose,” but Neil didn’t have time for bullshit.

“Sherry broke up with me.”

“What?”

“She wanted to talk about our relationship, and she broke up with me after we went out to dinner!  We’ve been dating for three years!  I don’t know what to do!”

Victor guided the panicking Neil further down the hallway so that no one in the lobby could see his friend possibly have a complete break down, “That’s what you get for talking about your feelings, Neil. You know, there’s only one thing we can do right now to make you feel better.”

“What’s that?”

“Drink the night away and find some lucky lady to take your mind off ol’ Sherry!”

Neil swallowed hard, shaking his head up and down with a single-minded focus, “Okay, okay, I’ll party, but I don’t want to hit on any women. I just got out of a long-term relationship 10 minutes ago, Victor!”

“Okay, suit yourself, more for me,” he shrugged his shoulders and led his friend out the door to hit several of the parties happening that Friday night.

\--

The two ended up at a frat house doing shots and daring each other to execute one extraordinarily ill-advised stunt after another.

Victor set down his beer after winning yet _another_ chugging contest and struggled to think of a dare with the perfect mix of both stupidity and risk, “I…dare you to, uh…cut off your mullet!  New hair for the new man!”

Without missing a beat, Neil accepted the challenge, taking a pair of scissors in hand that an unknown person had just placed on the table, “I’ll do it!  I can do it. I got this.”

Victor grabbed a mirror and held it up so that his friend could see what he was doing; a white dust that may have been coke fell to the ground in a puff.  Despite his willingness, Neil didn’t know where to start, “Uh, um, hang on, how—I can’t see the back of my head.”

“Here, let me see those,” Victor threw the mirror to the side and took the scissors from Neil.

“Have you ever cut hair before?”

“Nope!”

“Fuck yeah!”

He climbed on the back of an armchair and patted the seat in front of him with his feet so that Neil would know to sit there. When Neil was situated, Victor started snipping away, “Ohohoho, man, this is gonna be so gnarly!”

Two inches of brown hair fell to the dirty laminate floor, and Victor placed the scissors on the chair’s arm after deciding he had done enough damage to the back of Neil’s hairdo.  Once finished, Neil took a shard of the mirror Victor had thrown away earlier, “Huh, I thought I was gonna look terrible, but you just made me look more professional.  Hm.”

Victor didn’t know why, but he took this as a personal affront to his creativity and daring skills, “Oh, are you saying it was a lame dare then?  I bet you can’t do any better!”

“Well, I dare you to streak across campus buck naked and jump into the fountain!”

That was possibly the most college dare Neil could’ve thought of, and he damned himself for not thinking of it first. He couldn’t criticize the idea, but he would fire back with some sort of criticism to protect his pride, “I think it’s ‘butt’ naked, not ‘buck’ though.”

“No way, man, my grandma said it that way all the time.”

“Why was your grandma saying ‘naked’ all the time?”

“Never mind that!  Are you gonna take me up on the dare, or are you a chickenshit, Victor Pulak?”  Neil held out his arm, hand cupped so that Victor might grab his hand back in a super macho display of agreement and affection.

“You’re on!”

\--

A small crowd of partiers gathered as Victor stripped and Neil gathered each layer of clothing.  Victor tossed his underwear at Neil’s face, and everyone drunkenly cheered as Victor began sprinting full speed across the concrete towards the fountain at the heart of campus.  The crowd followed at a manageable pace, and a couple lucid minds suddenly remembered that there was a particular set of brick stairs in between them and the fountain named the Drunk Trap in which many drunken people met their ill-fated, clumsy demise.  However, before any of these knowledgeable partiers could voice this, a scream issued from the distance.

A couple others jogged along with Neil to see that Victor had tumbled across several of the Drunk Trap’s staggered levels, “I think, I think I need to see the nurse,” he grunted.

A random frat bro slurred in response, “The nurse isn’t open this late, dude.”

Victor’s scraped face contorted in pain as he tried to rise, “Hand me my clothes.”  He pulled the underwear Neil handed him up his skinned knees and lay on his back for a second, resting in pain. 

Neil sputtered, mind firing on cylinders that weren’t intoxicated, “I think we need to take you to the ER.  Where’s the nearest hospital?”

\--

The small examination room smelled sterile and had a beachfront theme.  Apparently someone had overlooked the minor detail that the beach didn't smell like latex.  Neil sat, elbows on knees, in a chair by the small sink, and Victor sat on the examination table.  On the way to the hospital, they’d covered most of the bleeding with a beach towel from the back of Neil’s car, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.  The wait for the doctor after the nurse had taken Victor’s vitals was immeasurable, so Victor decided to extract the details about his friend’s big break-up ever so subtly.

“So why did Sherry dump you?”

Neil sighed, arriving at the subject he had been trying to avoid all night, “Well, if you must know, she said she needs to focus on school right now and that she wants to be a self-sustaining, independent woman. I think she’s getting these ideas from her women’s studies class…”

“That’s ridiculous.  Why do women need to support themselves?  That’s what men are for!  Jeez, what are these 80s women thinking…just follow the example of the 50s housewife!  It worked on Leave it to Beaver, so why change it?”

“I’m not gonna argue that logic, but I _am_ going to respect her decision,” Neil changed the focus of their conversation to something lighter, “Hey, why don’t you tell me about the hottest girl you’ve ever made it with!  That should brighten the mood.”

“Uh, well she was blonde, and we met at this one building on campus and after that she said, ‘Wanna sex me up?’ So we went to a…by the…inside this one room…and did…what you do…put my dick in her, man, it was incredible.”

After hearing the incredibly forced, made-up story, Neil decided he’d had enough of his friend lying to him about his sex life, “I thought we were best friends, Victor.”

“What do you mean?  Of course we’re best friends.”

“Then why are you lying to me!”

“Wha—lie? Lie! Me lie?” He punctuated his disbelief with laughter, “Didn’t you just hear my story?  Jeez.”

“You haven’t had sex yet, but you keep pretending you have, even to me!”

“Okay, I lied!  But it’s not like you’ve ever had sex either.”

Neil stammered, blushing and looking for words on the floor.

This could only mean one thing.

“No…you’ve banged Sherry?  Dude!”

“Yeah, a couple times, but if you ask me, you’re not missing out on much,” he still couldn’t meet Victor’s eyes, shy about the whole subject.

“Come _on_.”

“No, I really don’t think it’s such a big deal. I actually prefer making out. It’s like the intimacy of sex but without all the gross sex stuff,” Neil laughed nervously, kicking his legs back and forth and waiting for Victor’s response when the door opened to reveal an exasperated doctor.  After examining Victor’s wounds, the doctor determined he had severely damaged parts of his thighs, cheek, ass, and upper arms, so he received a prescription for a particular ointment and advice that he mustn’t let the areas get infected lest they’ll fall off.

They wobbled out of the ER at around 2:30am. Victor reclined in the passenger seat of Neil’s car, pensive despite the wear and tear, staring blankly at the sagging material of the car’s roof interior.  Before Neil could start the car, Victor spoke, continuing their conversation from earlier, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. Like if sex isn’t such a big deal, why does everyone say it is?  It _has_ to be, or else I’ve been living a lie!”  He erupted into an emotional mess after realizing why he’d been dwelling on this thought for the entire ER visit, “Who am I if sex doesn’t matter!”

“I don’t think sex _doesn’t_ matter,” Neil dug deep into the intellectual parts of his mind, less shy this time around, “The thing is that you don’t have to bed a lot of women to be a man. I mean, some men never even have sex with women!”

“I just hope sex isn’t like making out like you said 'cause kissing is so fucking _boring_. Like I thought it was only the girl who was supposed to like kissing and then the guy gets to blow his load.”

“Maybe you’re just kissing the wrong people.” Neil started the car, and Loggins & Messina’s “Danny’s Boy” floated into the car on waves of romantic guitar strums,   
‘ _And in the morning when I rise, you bring a tear of joy to my eyes…’_

Something occurred to Victor that he couldn’t yet put into cohesive thought, but he was ready to act on it just the same. He turned to look at his friend tenderly, “Neil?”

“Yeah, Vic?”

Victor held his gaze and leaned forward, shifting across the gearshift for far too long, and eventually placing a kiss on Neil's mouth for just a moment before pulling away.

“You just kissed me,” the statement was more shocked than accusatory, but that didn’t stop Victor from jumping to scared conclusions.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.  You just kissed me.”

“I—it was, uh, I’m not—I gotta go!” No excuse would form in his mind, so Victor opened his door and started hobbling down the road.

Neil unbuckled his seat belt, ran around the car to shut the passenger door, and slid across the hood to get back into the driver’s seat.  He drove after Victor the whole way to campus, yelling at him to get back in the car, “Danny’s Song” blasting all the while.

He parked his car and yelled after his injured friend one more time, “Victor, wait!”

Victor kept defending himself desperately, but this time he stopped to direct his pleas toward his friend, “I didn’t do anything! Nothing happened! Why are you following me!”

Neil approached him, arms outstretched to assure Victor he wasn’t going to hurt him, “It’s okay.  Hey, shh.  Come here,” he gently pulled Victor in for a hug as Victor collapsed onto his shoulder. Neil reassured him over and over that everything was okay.

“No it’s not!  You’re not going to be my friend anymore!”  He sobbed and buried his head into Neil’s neck as if he were about to disappear.

This particular cry alerted Neil as to why Victor was overreacting, or rather, reacting perfectly normal to the imaged reaction Neil would have towards the kiss, “Hey, look at me.”

“No!”

“Look at me, goddammit!” Neil repeated, more assertive this time.

Raising his head warily, Victor looked into Neil’s eyes, while Neil looked back through glasses that made him look like a continuously shocked Porky Pig.  This time, Neil was the one to inch forward to place a sure kiss on Victor’s lips.  

Victor grinned uncontrollably, letting go a breathy laugh.

“Come on.  It’s been a hard day.  Why don’t you get some sleep?” Neil suggested warmly.

“Where are you gonna go?”

“I don’t know.  I was supposed to stay at Sherry’ place all this weekend, so…”

“Well, I have some bean bags you can push together and sleep on if you want or whatever.  Just putting my suggestion out there, being a good friend,” he didn’t want to seem too eager, but just the same, he was ecstatic to spend more time with his newly reunited best friend.

“I’ll take you up on that offer.”

The two walked away in high spirits in spite of the day’s events.  Neil laughed good-naturedly and gave Victor’s back a friendly pat and squeeze. Victor’s own laugh turned into a sob at Neil’s touch on his fresh wounds.

“Oh, sorry man.”

“It hurts so bad.”

“I know, buddy, I know.”


End file.
